The Press: Collier’s Reports a War

At Collier’s Fifth Avenue headquarters, the mysterious project was called “Operation Eggnog.” The man in charge of it was Associate Editor Cornelius Ryan, who for nine months acted as cloak & daggerish as if he were blueprinting an atomic war. That was just what he was doing.

Last week Collier’s unwrapped its own private World War III, its “Preview of the War We Do Not Want.” From the first shot “at exactly 1:58 p.m. G.M.T., Saturday, May 10, 1952 … a terrible Kremlin miscalculation” (the Reds tried to assassinate Tito and occupy Yugoslavia), until the occupation of Russia (“The outcome was inevitable”), the Armageddon took a full, fat, 130-page Collier’s issue. It also took a shining constellation of star writers.

For “Eggnog,” Collier’s jumped its print order from 3,400,000 to 3,900,000, spent $40,000 extra on articles, almost doubled its usual sale of advertising. It was a sensational journalistic stunt which, as such things often do, grew out of another idea.

In January, Irish-born Cornelius Ryan, a 31-year-old former war correspondent and author, suggested to Publisher Edward Anthony an article on what would happen if the U.S. were occupied by Russia. It gave Anthony a bigger idea: Why not devote an issue to a third world war? Ryan went secretly to work (only a few Collier’s staffers knew what was going on), traveling to Europe and around the U.S., collecting material, lining up writers. Pulitzer Prizewinner Robert E. Sherwood wrote the lead piece on history’s “most unnecessary, most senseless and deadliest” war. The A.P.’s Hal Boyle reported the Russian A-bombing of Washington (which had “destroyed the heart of the city”), Edward R. Murrow, the A-bombing of Moscow. Lowell Thomas watched U.N. paratroopers “chute into the Urals” and destroy the Soviets’ A-bomb stockpile, and Hanson Baldwin charted the three-year war’s strategy. In his usual slick style, Philip Wylie wrote the love story of a Russian girl, who had been sterilized by a bomb burst, and a U.S. major. Arthur Koestler, Marguerite Higgins, Walter Reuther, Walter Winchell and the Christian Science Monitor’s Erwin Canham were on hand to report on the rebirth in conquered Moscow of such things as religion, unions, a free press, the beginnings of democratic government. As a pious afterthought Collier’s said editorially: “We do not think that war is inevitable.” The special issue was “an appeal to the reason of Joseph Stalin and the men around him . . .”

For all its clairvoyance, the magazine had no report on what Stalin might think about its stunt. But many a reader was sure to feel that Collier’s pat, “inevitable” outcome of the war made “Eggnog” somewhat hard to swallow.